When you're in the kitchen, it's natural to want healthy alternatives. For a long time, the popularity of butter was unchallenged for its special qualities.
It was wholesome and natural, just the kind of thing you'd want for your children.
But there were concerns about whether butter had some unhealthy qualities and people began to experiment with alternative substances.
Crisco became the popular substitute and its place was enshrined in the jokes of many late night comedians.
It had the right texture.
And it was digestible, in case you just couldn't resist that lovely pie.
For few years Crisco remained popular, but eventually people realized that it had its own side-effects.
You had to use it in moderation. It was shortening.
The new formulation of Crisco eliminates the trans fat, but after recent medical studies, butter is coming back into favor.
Butter is wholesome and natural. It's better with butter!

Japanese fish delicacies are as beautiful as they are tasty.
Sashimi, raw fish, is gaining in popularity around the world. Often served alongside sushi and tempura, it's one of the very few animal products that can be a part of a non-vegetarian raw foods diet.
The most common fish used in sashimi are tuna, salmon, mackerel, and yellowfin, but the key is freshness, so just about any locally available fish may be used.
But what happens when good sashimi goes bad?
For the man who went to Guangzhou No. 8 People's Hospital in Guangdong Province in eastern China, it resulted in a stomach ache and itching.
Probably as a result of poor sanitation, some of the raw fish was contaminated.
The x-rays revealed that the man was infested with tapeworms and tapeworm larvae.
Tapeworm larvae are usually found in freshwater fish. Eating raw or undercooked fish can transmit the parasite.
Eventually the parasite can cause cysticercosis, where the adult worms enter the bloodstream. That type of infection is life threatening when it reaches the brain.
By the time this victim entered the hospital, the larvae had spread throughout his entire body.
The man is expected to survive the ordeal, and although he had a record number of larvae infesting his body. However, he didn't beat Sally Mae Wallace's record tapeworm. Sally, from Great Grits, Mississippi had a 37' tapeworm removed while completely conscious. But we're pretty sure the Chinese gentleman could beat the record if the larvae were all laid end to end.

Chicken "from the Colonel" is pretty popular, and not just in the United States. They have stores in 115 different countries. In Japan, KFC is a popular Christmas meal, and people order it weeks in advance.
Like other fast food restaurants, they occasionally have promotional chicken-based merchandise.
The chicken corsage should have your date eating out of your hand.
We know it's not a good idea to eat while you're using the computer. But sometimes we just can't resist that finger-lickin' good Kentucky Fried Chicken. So we're hoping to be one of the lucky winners of their latest promotion.
To celebrate Kentucky Fried Chicken's 30th year in Japan, the fast food chain is holding a special competition through which fans can enter to win a selection of chicken-tastic prizes. These prizes aren't available in stores, and they won't make your fingers greasy when you're at the computer.
First, there's the chicken keyboard. Every single key has been designed to have a chicken drumstick, a thigh piece, or a chicken wing sticking out of the key. Although the actual definitions of the keys are in white next to the keys, for the most part, it's a coop of chicken, with only the letters "K", "F" and "C" as actual letter keys.
The KFC logo replaces the Windows key and the keyboard also comes with a miniature Colonel Sanders standing by, as well as a KFC milkshake and a KFC bucket on the edges.
Urban legend says that some people have gotten a deep fried mouse instead of chicken. We don't believe those stories, but this KFC chicken mouse might give them legs. It only looks deep fried. It's really molded plastic.
For your sides, there's the fried chicken USB memory stick.
To complete the fashion, and accessorize the KFC corsage, you could win these fried chick earrings on a silver chain.
The Colonel Sanders Day competition runs from September 3 to September 24 and people can enter the competition by following the KFC Japan Twitter account and sharing a status about the competition on both Twitter and Facebook.
Coming up: Where chick nuggets come from.

Some dogs will eat just about anything.
This three year old Great Dane isn't picky. Like a lot of dogs, he swallows first and decides whether or not it was food afterwards.
Normally these things work themselves out in the end. But one day when he started to vomit repeatedly, his owners took him to the Dove Lewis Emergency Animal Hospital in Portland, OR., where he helped them earn second place.
His x-rays, showing 44 socks, won the clinic the $500 second place prize in the 2014 X-Ray Contest Winners from The Veterinary Practice News.
He arrived with a distended stomach so was treated with exploratory surgery, which quickly revealed the cause.
After the 43 1/2 socks were removed, he recovered quickly and was sent home the next day.
We recommend that he pass on the socks.

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
We've seen the future, and it's rubbish.
Plastic is our future because we can't get rid of it. Once in the environment, it's there to stay. It doesn't biodegrade like organic materials, and doesn't oxidize like metals. If it breaks down at all, it breaks down into smaller plastic pieces. A lot of it ends up in the oceans, and on the beaches.
Even the large marine animals are affected. This minke whale washed up on a beach.
When the contents of its stomach were examined, it was found to contain a lot of plastic grocery store bags.
Even though their diet is different than the whales' other creatures are affected too. The Laysan Albatross has especially suffered.
There's hardly a place they can go that isn't surrounded by plastic trash.
The origins are both marine and land based. Plastic doesn't observe political boundaries.
The stuff found inside the Laysan Albatross is usually familiar to most biologists. More frequently, however, what they find is recognizable to any modern person.
The organs of the dead birds have been displaced by colorful plastic trash.
These pictures illustrate how these albatrosses were found.
Even if we make an effort to use less plastic, and recycle more religiously, it already permeates the environment.
The birds consume everything from bottle caps to toothbrushes.
These birds contain more plastic than a Lego model.
The plastic is more colorful than the birds.
But we don't think it adds to their natural beauty.
We believe that these creatures should stick to an organic diet.
It's a lot healthier for them than plastic.

Once, when I was six years old, I saw a magnificent picture in a book called "True Stories", about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor swallowing a wild beast. Here is a copy of the drawing.

In the book it said: "Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion."
I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My drawing number 1. It looked like this:

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.
They answered me: "Why should any one be frightened by a hat?"
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Then, I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. My drawing number 2 looked like this:

The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic and grammar.
The transitive property proves that a boa constrictor could really swallow an elephant.
A crocodile can eat an elephant.
A snake can devour a crocodile. By the Transitive Property of Predation, a snake can eat an elephant. But they usually start with something smaller.
Biting off more than you can chew can cause indigestion, or worse. Nonetheless, some snakes have a hearty appetite.
It was still a considerable feat for the rock python that was spotted 25 miles outside the village of Billa in Gujarat, India.
At the snake's home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play, a young impala is a delicacy too good to pass up.
A well-endowed snake can swallow something bigger than itself. It's jaw and stomach can stretch a considerable amount.
Snakes don't chew their food. They like to savor it as it goes down.
Snakes have an efficient straight-line digestive system, so like an assembly line it can take in raw materials at one end and turn out a finished product from the other, with all the intermediate processes running concurrently.
Although it was almost down to the end, a crowd had gathered to watch, so the python, frightened, regurgitated the antelope. It's a common defensive response so the snake can quickly shed weight and get away fast.
Otherwise it could be there for a while.

The Red River delta and southern Mekong River delta in Viet Nam constitute half of the country's fish harvest, but there's an old regional favorite that isn't made from seafood.
The rats are captured in the wild
and sold in markets.
Compared to other types of meat, it's fairly cheap at about 50,000 dong, or $ 2.50 a pound.
If you're squeamish about the thought of eating a rat, just think of it as the analog of a cornish hen and chicken. A rat is nothing more than a tiny capybara.
The rats are washed before they're prepared for cooking.
Then they're skinned
And gutted.
If you want a night out, you can order your favorite entree at a rat restaurant.
They can be roasted over an open flame.
Or if your culinary delight is stuff on a stick
You can get your rat to eat on the go.
The rats are roasted until they're charred. For that outdoor flavor, you can cook them right in the back yard using manure for fuel.
Eat up!

We previously offered Farming With Dynamite, a DuPont publication. to show farmers how they could make effective use of dynamite to clear land instead of laboring on noisy and inefficient tractors.
The joy of dynamite doesn't end there. There are other agricultural uses. For example, what if you have to get rid of a bunch of animal carcasses?
Certainly you could blast holes and bury them. But there's a more direct way, as illustrated in this guide from the United States Department of Agriculture.